I received a response to my editorial last week about the skills of individuals applying for software developer positions. Because the email came through a non-traditional source I don’t have the name of the author for attribution. Our email reads:
I agree that Unit Testing and maybe even testing in general has suffered as we migrate into a new generation of developers. It has been my experience that the business side of development is not concerned as much with quality as it is with quantity. Developers that can churn out projects quickly are more desirable to business leaders than someone who spends considerably more time testing a project to ensure accuracy prior to production release. In my opinion, testing in general is the most important part of the software development process, behind of course solid requirements gathering and planning (another aspect of development that seems to be suffering.)
IMHO there is so much more to writing software than syntax. If all you need is syntax, you can get that from any number of google searches. Nothing else is required…just find a snippet of code that works, and off you go. I seem to find myself rescuing projects developed with this mindset. A group of developers will implement a powerful design strategy, and then corrupt it with code like the following.
const string someString = “SOMETEXT”.ToUpper().Trim();
If you don’t know what’s wrong with this text, let me explain. I have seen this in C#. There is a similar syntax for Java. The coder is creating a constant string that remains in memory for the life of the object in which it is declared. There will be only one copy of this string. They then have the ability to set the value of the string. So, why then do they convert the text to upper case, since they can control that when they type the string. Also, why trim off any leading or trailing spaces, again, because the control the contents of the string when they type it. This is just lazy or ignorant code technique.
Enough ranting for today. Thanks to the email contributor. Feel free to leave any further suggestions in our comments, or drop an email to btaylor@sswug.org.
Cheers,
Ben